Incompetent People Really Have No Idea, Studies Find

They're blind to own failings, others skills

There
are many incompetent people in the world. Dr. David A. Dunning is haunted by
the fear that he might be one of them.

Dunning,
a professor of psychology at Cornell, worries about this because according to
his research, most incompetent people do not know that they are incompetent.

On
the contrary. People who do things badly, Dunning has found in studies
conducted with a graduate student, Justin Kruger, are usually supremely
confident to their abilities-more confident, in fact, than people who do things
well.

“I
began to think that there were a lot of things that I was bad at and I didn’t
know it.” Dunning said.

One
reason that the ignorant also tend to be the blissfully self-assured, the
researchers believe, is that the skills required for competence often are the
same skills necessary to recognize competence.

The
incompetent, therefor, suffer doubly, they suggested in a paper appearing in
the December issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

“Not only do they reach
erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs
them of the ability to realize it,” wrote Kruger, now an assistant professor at
the University of Illinois, and Dunning.

This
deficiency in “self-monitoring skills,” the researchers said, helps explain the
tendency of the humor impaired to persist in telling jokes that are not funny,
of day traders to repeatedly jump into the market-and repeatedly lose out-and
of the politically clueless to continue holding forth at dinner parties on fine
points of campaign strategy.

In a series of studies, Kruger
and Dunning tested their theory of incompetence. They found that subjects who
scored in the lowest quartile on tests of logic, English grammar and humor were
also the most likely to “grossly overestimate” how well they performed.

In all three tests, subjects’
rating of their ability were positively linked to their actual scores. But the
lowest ranked participants much greater distortions in their self-estimates.

Asked to evaluate their
performance on the test of logical reasoning, for example, subjects who scored
only in the 12th percentile guessed that they had scored in the 62nd
percentile, and deemed their overall skill at logical reasoning to be at the 68th
percentile.

Similarly, subjects who scored
at the 10th percentile on the grammar test ranked themselves at the
67th percentile in the ability to “identify grammatically correct
standard English” and estimated their test score to be at the 61st
percentile.

On the humor test, in which
participants were asked to rate jokes according to their funniness (subject’
ratings were matched against those of an “expert” panel of professional
comedians), low-scoring subjects were also more apt to have an inflated
perception of their skill. But because humor is idiosyncratically defined, the
researchers said, the results were less conclusive.

Unlike unskilled counterparts,
the most able subjects in the study, Kruger and Dunning found, were likely to
underestimate their competence. The researchers attributed this to the fact
that, in the absence of information about how others were doing, highly
competent subjects assumed that others were performing as well as they were-a
phenomenon psychologists term the “false consensus effect.”

When high-scoring subjects were
asked to “grade” the grammar tests of their peers, however, they quickly
revised their evaluations of their own performance. In contrast, the
self-assessments of those who scored badly themselves were unaffected by the
experience of grading others; some subjects even further inflated their
estimates of their own abilities.

“Incompetent individuals were
less able to recognize competence in others,” the researchers concluded.

In a final experiment, Dunning
and Kruger set out to discover if training would help modify the exaggerated
self-perceptions of incapable subjects. In fact, a short training session in
logical reasoning did improve the ability of low-scoring subjects to assess
their performance realistically, they found.

The findings, the psychologists
said, support Thomas Jefferson’s assertion that “he knows best knows how little
he knows.”

And the research meshes neatly
with other work indicating that overconfidence is common; studies have found,
for example, that the vast majority of people rate themselves as “above
average” on a wide array of abilities-though such an abundance of talent would
be impossible in statistical terms. This overestimation, studies indicate, is
more likely for tasks that are difficult than those that are easy.

Such studies are not without
critics. Dr. David C. Funder, a psychology professor at the University of
California at Riverside, for example, said he suspects most lay people have
only a vague idea of the meaning of “average” in statistical terms.

“I’m
not sure the average person thinks of ‘average’ or ‘percentile’ in quite that
literal sense.” Funder said, “so above ‘average’ might mean to them ‘pretty
good’ or ‘okay,’ or ‘doing all right.’ And if, in fact, people mean something
subjective when they use the word, then it’s really hard to evaluate whether
they’re right or wrong, using the statistical criterion.”

But Dunning said his current
research and past studies indicated there are many reasons why people would
tend to overestimate their competency and not be aware of it.

In various situations, feedback
is absent, or at least ambiguous; even a humorless joke, for example. Is likely
to be met with polite laughter. And faced with incompetence, social norms
prevent most people from blurting out “You stink!”-truthful though this assessment
may be.